The encounters between Christendom and “Islam” in Spain and in the Levant were very different. In the Levant, Western Christendom intervened in an area that already had a long Christian tradition and a large Christian population, albeit one largely indistinguishable, to Western eyes, from the Muslims. In Spain, it was the position of “Islam” that changed, from victor to vanquished. The Moriscos became a feared and despised remnant in a Christian state that ultimately found their presence intolerable. The confrontation between French glory and Muslim resistance in North Africa was a synthetic crusade. In the Balkans, the third area where “Islam” met Christendom, the situation was different again. Only on one level—in the encounter between two religious faiths—was the position strictly comparable. Everything else—languages, history, and ethnicities—was different. But if there are few direct connections, there are at least suggestive parallels. In the Balkans, many local Christians in Albania and Bosnia converted to Islam, just as Christians had done in Spain in the first centuries after the Muslim conquest. In the Levant, after the mass conversions that followed the Muslim conquest, the local Christians preserved their own culture and faith largely intact. Orthodox Christians suffered more under the Latin Crusaders than they did under Islam.
All of these regions were detached from Europe. (If the Pyrenees do not now seem a daunting barrier, they did in earlier times.)58 The Levant was unquestionably part of the East, “belonging” to Europe only in a metaphysical sense. But the Balkans were Europe’s wild frontier, on the perimeter but nonetheless integral.59 By the sixteenth century the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans seemed a cancerous intrusion within the natural bounds of Christendom. The geographer Abraham Ortelius reflected a widely held view when he wrote, “For Christians, see Europeans,” in the 1587 edition of his Thesaurus geographicus.60 The reemphasis of the idea of Christendom (even though irretrievably divided by the Protestant Reformation) was generated by the threat from Islam. The constant fear of Ottoman incursions across an open frontier made the Turks’ possession of these formerly Christian lands a real menace.
From the last quarter of the sixteenth century, even if there was no war between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, almost every year Tartar bands slipped across the border from Hungary and raided as far west as Steyr in western Austria. Like the conflict in the Mediterranean, which was punctuated by great battles such as Lepanto, this new enmity was never ending. The struggle with Islam in the Balkans, within the body of Europe, became more virulent than any earlier encounters. All the weight of anti-Islamic propaganda, such as the fiery orations of the seventeenth-century Austrian divine Abraham à Sancta Clara, of the hundreds of books and pamphlets directed against the Turks, constituted a sustained attack unlike any which had been deployed before. Thus, the Balkans became the mise en scène for the final act of Europe’s encounter with “Islam,” a last “crusade.” Unfortunately, the long-run consequences of that antagonism have outlived the Ottomans.
Part Four
CHAPTER NINE
Balkan Ghosts?
IN MY GRANDFATHER’S HOUSE, WORLDLY BOOKS WERE KEPT IN A DARK, musty, and icy-cold back room. Downstairs, in a stained-oak bookcase with little green curtains covering the glazed panels, were the various editions of The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation from the Original Languages by J. N. Darby, the King James Bible (for critical and comparative purposes), Cruden’s Concordance, and shelves of pamphlets, Bible readings, and tracts. There too were the Bible games that we played on Sundays—question 6: “Name the three good men cast into the burning fiery furnace.” But upstairs were forgotten and ignored heaps of old National Geographic magazines, and untidy piles of books that had belonged to my grandfather’s childhood and which still bore the grubby finger marks of my own father’s avid reading. There were many volumes of G. A. Henty’s stirring and, I still think, rather effective tales; Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine; the gung ho patriotic Our Living Generals; and all the literary paraphernalia of a Victorian boy’s childhood. The National Geographics were exceptionally worldly, but then my grandfather had received the Lord quite late in life and absolute consistency was never his strongest point anyway.
However, amid all the battles and gore of the books, only one thing terrified me. In a dull gray-blue tome called With the Colours, or, The Piping Times of Peace, R. Mountjoy Jephson described the adventures of a young officer in the 1860s. He overcame the natives in the Ionian Isles, Hong Kong, India, China, and Japan, and his trusty revolver saved him in many sticky situations. But in Corfu he nearly met his end. A huge Albanian dog attacked him:
In a moment, I am dashed to the ground, and the infuriated beast is over me. He struggles to get at my throat, but fortunately my hands are already at his and I hold him off … His hot breath fans my face, his eyes gleam like pieces of live coal, and the saliva streams from his cruel powerful jaws. Those sharp white teeth have already met in my flesh, for my hands and the sleeves of my coat are crimsoned with blood and I feel the warm current trickling down my arms as I hold him from me.
Fortuitously young Bob Foyle has a hunting knife and manages, with difficulty, to kill his adversary. Then he faces the dog’s avenger: “The Albanian with his long yataghan naked and uplifted in his hand, his face livid and distended with fury, is within three paces of me.” Trusty Sheffield-steel hunting knife parries yataghan, but
the sharp blade of the yataghan glances off the handle of my knife and rips my forearm from wrist to elbow … I now grapple with him, for the closer we are the better for me … I notice how strong he smells of garlic; and even to this day a whiff of that redolent bulb always brings to my mind the deadly perils of that savoury embrace.1
All ended well. Bob’s chums rescued him in the nick of time, and bound the Albanian hand and foot. But Bob, mindful that he had killed the man’s obviously beloved dog, turned him loose. Simkin’s engraved illustration of this event terrified me at the age of nine, and still has the power to frighten. The Albanian rushing from the woods, with dark cruel eyes, tight lips, and a bristling beard, was the stuff of nightmares. To this day it remains my first instinctive and childish understanding of the Balkans. But I was not alone in my terror: fear of the East is common to many nations. For the English, the barbarians began at Calais, and according to Prince Metternich, Asia began at Vienna’s high road, the Rennweg, which led east to Hungary.2 Yet this cultural map was never exact nor precise. The lands south of the rivers Danube and Sava had a double character. They were both part of Europe and part of the East; the same was true farther north. Poland and Russia were Christian, but they were also savage. The heart of this paradox lay in Greece: indubitably Balkan, part of the Ottoman world, yet also the cradle of Hellenism and of Western civilization. How could Greece have fallen so low, from its ancient glory to the decayed state described by European travelers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
The answer was the Ottomans. “Turkey in Europe” had begun in the fourteenth century, had occupied the Christian lands from the Aegean to Budapest by the 1530s, and then slowly diminished from its apogee until it included only the plain of Adrianople, its first European center, and the city of Constantinople (Istanbul) by the 1920s. Almost five centuries of Ottoman rule became the whipping boy for everything that had gone awry in these lands. There was a wildness and rugged strength in both the peoples and the topography of the Balkans; the Turks made the people into savages and the landscape became, if anything, even more untamed. In his remarkable book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (1994), Robert D. Kaplan talks of the Ottomans as if they had overlain the Balkans like an incubus. Anything that was misbegotten could, in one way or another, be traced back to their presence. An Orthodox nun, Mother Tatiana, one of his main informants, told him, “We [the Serbs] would have been even greater than the Italians, were it not for the Turks.” Kaplan himself added: “That was a refrain you heard throughout the Balkans, in Dame Rebecca’s day [Dame Rebecca West, author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon] and in
mine. Dame Rebecca writes, ‘The Turks ruined the Balkans, with a ruin so great that has not yet been repaired.’ ”3
For Kaplan, the Balkan past could be mobilized to explain the dark and harrowing events of the Balkan present. I had admired the quality and insight of his writing for many years; I liked his capacity to present nuance, light and shade. But in Balkan Ghosts, those qualities were absent: he now wrote of a world that contained only horror and atrocity, without nuance, always haunted by a sanguine past. Even his vocabulary had darkened. It was still compelling; and yet, at the same time, he brought back fearful memories of the garlic-scented Albanian of my childhood.
The reasons for his deepening gloom grew from the times in which he wrote. Here was a man seeing places, which he had known in happier days, that had suddenly become murderous and savage. He discovered the origins of this bleak transformation wholly within the region’s long (and dark) history. Past was present, with metaphors of atrocity drawn from the 1870s being attached to the atrocities of the 1990s. The Bulgarian massacres of 1876, when Ottoman bashibazouks killed thousands with their lances and yataghans, were the point at which, for Robert Kaplan, we could say, “In modern times, it all began here.”4 He was creating a special type of history for the Balkans—what the social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein later called “TimeSpace,” where “the meaning of time and space in our lives is a human invention … time and space are irremediably locked together and constitute a single dimension.”5 Wallerstein used one Balkan example, that of Kosovo, and one from Northern Ireland, to show that two completely divergent versions of the past could exist simultaneously within the same area, visions that no amount of evidence could alter or disprove.6 This is what anthropologists used to call the anthropological present—a kind of TimeSpace particularly suitable for “primitive” peoples, in whose world “time had frozen, and where there was no possibility of change or alteration.”7 This style of history of the Balkans is exemplified by Franjo Tudjman, scholar and first president of independent Croatia after 1991.8
But later, as I read more widely, it became clear that Kaplan was not alone in adopting these conventions. He stood in a long tradition of writing about Balkan malevolence and darkness.9 Some eight decades before Kaplan’s Journey through History, another writer, Harry de Windt, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, author of The New Siberia, A Ride to India, and From Paris to New York by Land, visited the Balkans as a special correspondent of the Westminster Gazette. His book was entitled simply Through Savage Europe. He explained why:
“Why ‘Savage Europe’?” asked a friend who had recently witnessed my departure from Charing Cross for the Near East.
“Because,” I replied, “the term accurately described the wild and lawless countries between the Adriatic and the Black Seas.”
For some mystic reason, however, most Englishmen are less familiar with the geography of the Balkan States than with that of Darkest Africa. This was my case and I had therefore yet to learn that these same Balkans can boast of cities which are miniature replicas of London and Paris. But these are civilised centres. The remoter districts are, as of yore, hotbeds of outlawry and brigandage, where you must travel with a revolver in each pocket, and your life in your hand, and of this fact, as the reader will see, we had tangible and unpleasant proof before the end of the journey. Moreover, do not the now-palatial capitals of Servia and Bulgaria occasionally startle the outer world with crimes of medieval barbarity … Wherefore the word “savage” is perhaps not wholly inapplicable to that portion of Europe which we are about to traverse.10
Windt and Kaplan were saying roughly the same thing. The Balkans were irredeemable, cursed by their collective past. A “journey through history” becomes a tour through the heart of darkness, a catalog of horrors. Thus, set into the context of this dark past, the present—in either 1907 or 1993—seems explicable. The same stories inevitably appear in both books in different guises: the (improbable) blinding of 14,000 captured Bulgars by Emperor Basil II Bulgaroctonos “the Bulgar Slayer,” Vlad the Impaler with his forest of twisting bodies, the grim battlefield of Kosovo Polje. Kaplan was able to add the nightmare events of the 1990s. Harry de Windt had rushed through on a whirlwind tour, but Robert Kaplan moved more methodically, recording the authentic voices of nemesis, such as Mother Tatiana, who had, like Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, seen everything and suffered it all.
“I am a good Christian, but I will not turn the other cheek if some Albanian plucks out the eyes of a fellow Serb or rapes a little girl or castrates a twelve-year-old Serbian boy.” … My eyes adjusted to the darkness and for the first time I got a good look at her face. She had a strong, lusty appearance, with high cheekbones and fiery maternal eyes. She was a handsome old woman who was clearly once attractive. Her eyes, while fiery, also appeared strangely unfocused, as though blotted out by superstition.11
Here is a deeper truth. Blindness of superstition, old stories embellished, retold, and then made still more bitter in the retelling, lie at the heart of these journeys through history.
By contrast, the Irishman James Creagh, author of A Scamper to Sebastopol and Jerusalem in 1867, presented himself as a species of tweedy fool, for whom everything turns sunny side up.12 Just as the Muslim inhabitants of the Balkan provinces of Herzegovina and Bosnia were taking up arms against the reforming sultan in Constantinople, he set out on a leisurely tour down the Danube to Belgrade, thence west into Bosnia and Croatia, and finally meandering south to the mountains of Herzegovina, Montenegro, and the Albanian lands. His book, published in the following year, was entitled Over the Borders of Christendom and Eslamiah: A Journey Through Hungary, Slavonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia, and Montenegro, to the North of Albania in the Summer of 1875.
Creagh’s principal preoccupation seems to have been “tall and well-made girls in gaudy bodices and petticoats [that] gave them, at a distance, the appearance of Affghan maidens.”13 But beneath the jovial banter, Creagh saw things in a very different perspective than many other Western travelers. He quoted an old and much-traveled Magyar whom he met on the journey down the Danube.
The travelling philosopher will find men and women, at bottom, the same everywhere. There is the same ambition in every heart; the same credulity in every mind; the same roguery in every priest; the same desire to domineer in every woman; and the same selfishness among all. Their languages and education are alone different.14
Unusually he made few distinctions between Muslims and Christians. In Belgrade, he described a panorama of the “graceful minarets of the deserted Turkish mosques, the church steeples, and the wide red-tiled roofs”; the mosques were “now closed or used for the vilest purposes; and in a place once considered sacred by the Turks, their temples are defiled and desecrated by a people who were once their slaves.”15
However, in some respects, Creagh offered much the same overall picture as other writers. Outside the towns and cities the Balkans were lawless, as Ottoman government had little authority in its borderlands. Creagh described a Turk who told him that it was extremely dangerous to travel in Bosnia, and pointed to a wound in his side, which he said had come from an attack in the woods the day before. Anyone, Muslim or Christian, local or visitor, was a possible victim. The seemingly imperturbable Irishman stayed in filthy hans, where “dirty, picturesque and handsome-armed ruffians lay about the floor”; was attacked by swarms of fleas—“The vilest lodging house in St Giles [in London] could not have been more abominable than this place; nevertheless … I never slept more comfortably.”16 But he observed rather than condemned, and certainly did not blame all the ills of the Balkans on the Ottomans:
The Turks and the Christians in Bosnia, except for service in the army, are on a footing of equality; but the remembrance of ancient persecutions still inspires those deadly hatreds which, like the passions of the Ribandmen [a Catholic association] and Orangemen [a Protestant association] in the north of Ireland are ever ready to break out with a violence all the more astonis
hing because the causes that might justify it have long been removed.
[In Bosnia] a feast, a procession, a word or a song may set the province in a blaze which would throw even the riots of Belfast into the shade … God knows the Turkish Government is not the most enlightened administration in Europe; but it has fearful difficulties to contend with and its despotic and paternal rule certainly prevents the Bosniacs from tearing each other to pieces.
Every misfortune is attributable to the Turks, and we hear so often that they are tyrants and oppressors that the people generally believe they are so.17
In Montenegro, later on his journey, he had another encounter, very similar to Robert Kaplan’s meeting with Mother Tatiana.
A gentleman, bristling with arms and wearing a light green body coat told me he was a barrister. Expressing wonder at my having escaped without any incidents during so long a journey in Turkey [in Europe] he began to apostrophise the Turks in gracefully rounded periods, delivered in impassioned gestures of forensic eloquence. With flashing eyes, he called them dogs, pigs, foxes, snakes and serpents; and declared that they were as brutal, uncivilised and degraded, as the Christians of the same provinces were cultivated, polished and advanced.
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 28